Was over a decade ago. It was an Airbus A310 or something like that.. Got caught in windshear on takeoff and tried to use the rudder to get out of it, but it put too much stress on the aircraft, and the tail ripped apart in flight. At least that's what I think what happened.. What he was doing wasn't exactly wrong, it was just wrong for that type of aircraft. I believe he flew C130's before, and that was actual the correct method of exiting windshear on that type of aircraft. But, the C130 has a much, lets say, "stronger" tail and rudder section, that could handle that kind of stress.

 

Wasn't wind shear. It was some wake turbulence from a 747 that had just taken off and was about 5 miles away which is normal spacing. They said that if the PF hadn't man handled the rudder as he did, the aircraft would have easily flown out of the wake turbulence. The PF exacerbated the situation by using full a rapid rudder inputs, which caused the rudder to fail, and separate from the aircraft. At that point, the aircraft basically broke apart with the engines separating from the wings, and it did a flat spin into the ground. Airbus had cautioned pilots not to use the rudder this way prior to this crash, but apparently the airline did not cover this in their pilot training. It was an A300-600

Among other things, as I recall, the engines functioned like gyroscopes, since they were at high rotational speed just after takeoff. They kept going on the previous course when the aircraft didn't.

 

Mike

American Airlines Flight 587.  The crew repeatedly use full left and right rudder and caused enormous stress on the airplane tearing the rudder off.

 

http://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Pages/AAR0404.aspx

Thanks CavScout!

 

Chas

It was also a design/maintenance flaw in the Airbus. The rudder attachment points were designed with carbon fibre brackets through which steel plates and fixings were inserted to attach to the tail surface. Rudders shouldn't fly off at initial climb speed, although the co-pilot was making aggressive inputs. There have been quite a few rudder failures associated with Airbuses. I don't know if they've fixed them yet but they are also notoriously over-sensitive to manual input at anything over 200 knots. 

They found out after this as well that Va (Maneuvering Speed) does not guarantee you more than one complete abrupt control movement without exceeding limits. The rudder can exceed over 4 times normal limits by giving full left and right deflections.  This was one element they highlighted during a recent advanced upset recovery training that I recently went to. 

Wasn't wind shear. It was some wake turbulence from a 747 that had just taken off and was about 5 miles away which is normal spacing. They said that if the PF hadn't man handled the rudder as he did, the aircraft would have easily flown out of the wake turbulence. The PF exacerbated the situation by using full a rapid rudder inputs, which caused the rudder to fail, and separate from the aircraft. At that point, the aircraft basically broke apart with the engines separating from the wings, and it did a flat spin into the ground. Airbus had cautioned pilots not to use the rudder this way prior to this crash, but apparently the airline did not cover this in their pilot training. It was an A300-600

Yeah, I wasn't too sure what it exactly was, and what type of old-school wide-body airbus it was. But I remember now.